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shadowspar writes "A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service after a news investigation revealed that they briefly flash a jackpot result on the screen every time they are played. Konami claims that the 'subliminal' jackpot images are unintentional and the result of a bug, but other US and Canadian jurisdictions are looking at pulling the machines as well."

Also suspect was the fact that if you pressed up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B and then A, the machine would flash the jackpot screen continually while declaring all its cash "are belong to you." Casinos grew suspicious after younger and younger players continually cleaned out the machine in a methodical manner before eventually treating their "conquering" of the slot as a standard Saturday morning ritual.

I'm sorry, it's Monday and I definitely wish I could UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA my job right now. I used to think that this cheat code (or things like the game genie) were detrimental to youthful minds thinking that you just needed to figure out the trick to life and everything was over. I used to think that they would grow up expecting everything to be easy once you were "in on it" and that this would be bad and they would never understand that life is much more complicated. But, you know what? I sadly see more and more everyday that it's a matter of knowing what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA to tell your boss to make him/her think you know what's going on. Or what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA you tell someone to befriend them to hook you up with a position/help. And then it's to the pharmacy where you're given more UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA in pill form because your doctor (of which there are thousands of kinds) tells you you need it. Notice the tangents my brain flies off on when it's Monday.

A manufacturer of computerized gambling equipment, WMS Gaming, of Chicago, earlier this year sued Edmonton, Alberta, software consultant Zues Yaghi for $10 million after he showed the company and Canadian authorities a "back door" he'd discovered in the company's casino slot machines.

In a case that was reported in Canada, but mostly ignored elsewhere, Yaghi went to officials of the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, who videotaped the consultant winning hundreds of dollars, according to The Edmonton Journal. He turned all the money over to the officials on the spot.

Both Yaghi and the manufacturing company say the software error in the machines allowed millions of dollars of fraudulent gains. At least two people other than Yaghi took advantage of the bug at casinos in the United States and Canada before the software was fixed, the company says.

Yaghi may have erred when he proposed to the company that they hire him as a consultant to find and repair such flaws for a fee of $250,000. The company offered $50,000 instead, which Yaghi declined.

The company then obtained an order from a Canadian court to seize computers from Yaghi's home, persuaded the gaming commission to ban him from Alberta casinos, and filed the $10 million lawsuit.

In response, Yaghi is suing WMS Gaming for $1 million and the gaming commission for $3 million.

All scientific tests done in a controlled (mod up) environment have come up with the same conclusion: it doesn't work. The one suggestion that (+1) has generated some interest recently, and (+1) has not been tested, is that the most that can be accomplished (modup) is familiarity with the idea. This is (+1) not the same as motivation. So you can put the tin foil hats away.

While the evidence that subliminal advertising [wikipedia.org]affects behaviour a very similar technique (backward masking) is used in psychology experiments to good effect. The upshot being that presenting stimuli below the conscious threshold *can* affect behaviour. Presenting images of a jackpot win on a gaming machine might just prolong the time that a player is willing to play. Good news for the manufacturer, not so good for the player. Anyhow - what are the changes of a *bug* causing this behaviour?

Not out of the question, actually. If the machine is coded to start at slot indeces 0,0,0,0,0, or they bring an image of the wheel up before they actually initialize the variables (which I would assume to be wiped to 0 by default), it could simply be displaying a neutral uninitialized state. And what would be the most important number on the wheel, which you would start with when programming it?

You can't be brainwashed but your moods can be altered. There have been numerous test that show that flashes of dramatic images can cause emotional changes. There was a very recent experiment that showed the name of a nagging loved one can cause people to do worse on test when that name is only flashed for a brief 1/4th second to slow for the person to consciously detect. We do unconsciously see things, the ability to "control" people though that is doubtful, the ability to alter their train of thought is

There was a very recent experiment that showed the name of a nagging loved one can cause people to do worse on test when that name is only flashed for a brief 1/4th second to slow for the person to consciously detect.

IME,.25 sec is quite enough to register even more than just a name - say, full two lines of text, i.e. in a subtitle.

The same thing as wheels spinning backwards, though I don't know what's that effect called in English...

The idea is if you flashed jackpot consciously you would react positively. But they can't legally flash jackpot for no reason. So if you flash jackpot unconsciously you might have a similar but subdued reaction.

Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such "conflict tasks" are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how response competition evolves in the motor cortex. To investigate the dynamics of motor cortex activation during response competition, we used a subliminal priming task that induced response competition while bypassing preresponse stage processing conflict. Analyses of movement-related EEG potentials supported an interaction between competing responses characterized by reciprocal inhibition. Inhibitory interactions between response channels contribute to the resolution of response conflict. However, the reciprocal inhibition at motor cortex level seemed to operate independent of higher level conflict-monitoring processes, which were relatively insensitive to response conflict induced by subliminal priming. These results elucidate how response conflict causes interference as well as the conditions under which frontal-lobe-based interference control processes are engaged.

Psychologists have long reported that words that are made invisible by forward andbackward masking can nevertheless cause behavioral priming effects. Functionalneuroimaging can now be used to explore the neural bases of masked priming. Subliminalpriming causes reduced activation in multiple areas (fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, andmotor cortex), in direct correspondence with behavioral manifestations of priming at theorthographic, semantic, and motor level. This implies that a whole stream of processors canoperate unconsciously. The neural code in each area can be assessed by varying prime-targetrelations. A simple mathematical framework is proposed that tentatively relates priming at thevoxel level with the shape of the tuning curves of single neurons in the underlying tissue.Priming thus provides a general method to study the fine microcode in each brain region (the'priming method').

Joking aside, subliminal priming [google.com] is making a comeback in experimental psychology. It was somewhat discredited in the 60s and 70s (i.e., the urban legend [snopes.com] about theaters flashing "Drink Coke" on movie screens), but more recent work [millisecond.com] has uncovered the parameters and boundaries to make it a viable experimental technique. It is typically used in controlled lab situations to study automatic processing of information in isolation from conscious, intentional thought. It's not entirely clear from the research literature whether it would work in this kind of real-life applied context. But it wouldn't be hard for a casino to do the testing to find out.

I've come to see the bloody movie; all you can accomplish by giving me 20 minutes of ads beforehand is a vow never ever to buy anything advertised in cinemas.

Well, that and loss of revenue, since I'm sure not going to pay money to watch the movie after 20 minutes of commercials when I can download it and watch it for free. Boo hoo, I steal your virtual money. Piss off, your commercials are stealing my real time.

Who needs a subliminal jackpot flash that may or may not be proven to work when you have a 20' light up sign tallying the payout of the casino hovering a few feet above the slot machine trenches? Who needs a momentary flash when the payout trays are engineered so they ring extra loud and clear during a win that the entire casino floor can hear it?

Who needs subliminal advertising when the shortcut to riches is so ingrained into the psyche that this mere promise was enough to supply a city with excess revenue for over half a century before they decided to change gears into an entertainment destination?

Who needs a momentary flash when the payout trays are engineered so they ring extra loud and clear during a win that the entire casino floor can hear it?

Wow, you found a casino that's still using coins in slots?

Who needs subliminal advertising when the shortcut to riches is so ingrained into the psyche that this mere promise was enough to supply a city with excess revenue for over half a century before they decided to change gears into an entertainment destination?

Well, considering it's a Canadian story, and we have $1 and $2 coins rather than bills, it's not really ALL that surprising, is it?

Yes, because here in the US, we don't want to deal with fills (in spite of the comments about Vegas having slots with coins, properties that actually use them are in the minority, and the coin-filled slots are far in the minority even at those properties) so we just use ticket-out; the slots print out tickets with unique barcodes which are linked to a row in a database. The tickets can be inserted into another machine (ticket-in) or they can be redeemed at the cashier's cage or, on properties which have them, a kiosk. Most properties have at least a redemption kiosk that looks like a bill changer, some have a full kiosk with a screen that lets you redeem points and such as well.

How large are the barcodes ?
How often can invalid barcodes be tried before someone comes out to check on them ?

I don't have a ticket handy but they're pretty long. AFAIK the machine will keep letting you try the ticket. However, the machines are all in locations where they can be monitored not only by people on the floor, but also by surveillance. Casinos have more cameras per cubic foot than probably anywhere else on the planet.

How many tickets can I insert at a time before I have to hit the payout button ?
Do theese machines check for a ticket pattern, only the barcode pattern, is there a time delay ?
Barcodes are always the same width, but are theese barcodes a constant height or do they vary slightly ?

How many tickets can I insert at a time before I have to hit the payout button ?

When inserting tickets into slots, you can insert as many as you like up to the maximum. I don't know what that is, and it may be configurable (but may also be mandated per jurisdiction.) When inserting tickets into kiosks, they tend to pay off on it immediately.

Do theese machines check for a ticket pattern, only the barcode pattern, is there a time delay ?

By time delay, I'm wondering if a pause is factored in between the reading of areas that a real ticket would have.
If there's no pause, & it acknowledges theese areas any time they're seen, it might be possible to craft brute force tickets that are just large enough so that the eye in the sky doesn't notice the difference, but still allow more space to print this info.
If I can print a ticket that's 4 inches long & the scanner only requires 1/16th of an inch worth of information & there's no tim

If I can print a ticket that's 4 inches long & the scanner only requires 1/16th of an inch worth of information & there's no time delay in the scanning, that's roughly 50 attempts per ticket.

I see what you're saying. There is indeed a time delay - it's probably built right into the bill reader unit itself. You have to wait a moment after paper is rejected before you can insert another. Also the barcode reader would almost certainly not have the resolution to pick up a barcode that short.

Well, that just takes all the fun out of it doesn't it??? Lazy bastards...

Like anything else, some customers love it and some hate it. Regardless, besides the work issue, it is also more sanitary. Also you don't have issues with little old ladies dropping their bucket of quarters and being all irate if you don't find every quarter they think was in their cup:)

It is true, though, that casinos are always trying to give you less and make you think you're getting more... But at the same time, they do have a

There's a funny story which I think is attributed to John Scarne, who, back in the old days, was often called in by casinos as a gambling consultant. One of the heavy slots players he interviewed was complaining to Scarne that "these slots just never pay!" Scarne replied, "Sure they do. They pay for the lights, the food, the entertainment, the dealers..."

I work in a tribal casino and I am continually amazed at how much money people will stuff into machines, but then I'm a gamer and if I don't get to control anything (the amount of bet/number of lines is just not enough for me) then I get bored easily.

Might I suggest backgammon [bkgm.com]? It's a wonderful game of manipulating probabilities and making expected value estimations, with enough random chance to keep it exciting.

I'm not privy to the details of the ticket system - When I've attended conferences etc I've been paying attention to other aspects of the program (in this case Aristocrat OASIS) like the pit ratings, the back end, etc. On one hand I like to know all I can, on the other hand some of this stuff is mind-numbingly boring and I go and learn what I need to learn and then get the hell out and go drink somewhere. (I'm not a gambler - when I go to c

I'm betting that the tickets are issued from a central database and so the numbers on them are only valid after they are issued. Those numbers are probably only valid for a limited period of time too.They might stupidly be using a sequential numbering system so you could theoretically rip off another customer by getting a ticket and then making another ticket with a slightly higher number.

But you probably would need to lug around a customized ticket printer- possibly with customized tickets- possibly with

I can confirm the first paragraph and deny the second paragraph of your report. It does use a centralized database. It does not use sequential numbers, at least not in clear - they are at minimum obfuscated in some way. But I suspect they're guaranteed unique and psuedorandom.

Everything in a casino is engineered to encourage you to keep playing. From the obvious (as you said, huge jackpot signs, loud noises when someone wins) - to the not-so-obvious (carpets on the gaming floor are often intentionally ugly to encourage you to look up at the gaming). Have no noticed there are no clocks *anywhere*? That is, except for the computers. If I'm playing blackjack, which I do once or twice a year, I try to grab a 3rd base seat near a computer if I don't have a watch or phone on me.

Some places even have huge fish tanks as you're exiting, some would say to calm you down after a big loss so you're more likely to come back.

I've always found it interesting/creepy how in many of the big casinos in Vegas it is really easy and welcoming coming in, but confusing and cumbersome to leave...Excalibur is a good example: a moving walkway shuttles you right in the door, but to leave you have to find your way around the moving walkway, since there is no outbound equivalent, sometimes shuffling between turrets, up stairs, etc. Station Casinos are another good example, where the entrances are all big and well-marked from the outside, but once you get in the door, the exits are all blackened/darkened/mirrored so they kind of blend into the rest of the decor, and the inside of the casinos are labyrinthine at best. At many like Sahara, Imperial Palace, Luxor, and Wynn, the main entrance dumps you out into the valet horseshoe, so you have to brave walking in front of taxicabs, limos, and impatient drunk drivers to get off of the property.

Actually, I spend a lot of time in Mohegan Sun casino, one of the 2 large Indian casinos in Connecticut. I frequent the bars there... but I don't gamble. However, it's taken a LONG time to get used to the layout of the place.Safety isn't bad, as there are exit signs everywhere for the emergency exits. The issue is finding the one you came in from, which makes it harder to go home. But if there was a fire, you'd just head out the nearest marked emergency exit door and find yourself outside, without a clue

Don't forget that in a lot of casinos you have to go down stairs to enter - that means you have to go up to exit (something a lot of people doesn't like to do). Also chairs a blackjack tables (card games in general, but I play blackjack) tend to be a lot lower than the dealer, it makes it psychologically harder to stand up to the guy/gal and leave.

"Everything in a casino is engineered to encourage you to keep playing. From the obvious (as you said, huge jackpot signs, loud noises when someone wins) - to the not-so-obvious (carpets on the gaming floor are often intentionally ugly to encourage you to look up at the gaming)."

It's not just that, they also custom tune all those noises from each of various games so that they merge together into an comfortable, enjoyable sound, as opposed to sounding like chaos (such as your typical Chuck E. Cheese arcade).

...but as a programmer I have difficulty believing that the images are "accidentally" appearing

Agreed - the likelihood of this being a "bug" seems monumentally remote. How could a "draw screen" routine keep accidentally writing a screen that it is least likely of every drawing? Did they optimize by doing a call to displayJackpot() on every screen flip just in case it's that one in a billion or so times that it actually needs to?

To state the obvious, the reason for this screen is starting in the poor gambler

It is not that uncommon that you end up with stuff flashing on the screen for a fraction of a second in game programming. It can for example easily happen when try to place a sprite on the screen, but only initialize its positions position value after having gone through the draw loop once, i.e. something like this:1. call update() to handle game events, one of them triggers the creation of a new object A2. call draw() to draw the current game state3. call update() and only now finalize the initialization o

Yeah, especially on the new slots with only a CRT/TFT screen. Doing graphics in games can really give you some interesting problems, combining it with stuff like C and you miss a pointer position and load that data to the graphics card and you are in for a lot of fun debugging.

So all those Ninja Turtle games I've played as a kid was really subliminial messages to get me to buy pizza? No wonder all those kids are so crazy over yugioh. It's all subliminall messages, I tell ya.

Except for the sound of coin hitting the payout tray under the slot machine. That has a pitch and timbre so striking and unique that it jumps out at you every time.

That's done on purpose, because that's the noise they most want you to hear. The payout trays are basically large hollow bells, specifically engineered to give the sharpest, clearest, most distinctive sound possible at the drop of every coin.

The payout trays are basically large hollow bells, specifically engineered to give the sharpest, clearest, most distinctive sound possible at the drop of every coin.

I think that may be on the way out. I was in Vegas last year, and the slots are almost all paper now. You put in dollars or coins, and, if you win, get paid in a printed receipt that you bring to the cashier. The receipts also have a bar code so you can put it in another machine. Much better for the old biddies instead of lugging around bucke

One of the examples in his book is a Playboy centerfold of a beautiful blonde reclining on some silky sheets. The brilliant Mr. Key discovered that if you hold the page up to the light so that the printing on the back shows through, and look carefully at the folds of the sheets in a lower corner of the photo, you can kinda-sorta see the letters "s e x".

I read that and thought: How naive of the rest of us to think the sexiness was due to something as obvious as a large, clear photo of a beautiful naked woman, when the real secret was three fuzzy letters in the corner that can't even be seen under normal magazine reading conditions! In other words, the guy's a loon.

I was under the impression that the idea of subliminal advertising was debunked some thirty years ago...

I don't know about that, but your subject line reminded me of a completely different experiment about hiding the obvious. Subjects were shown a scene where there were a number of people, one of whom was doing something repetitive. (I can't remember what.) They were asked to count the number of times he performed the action (which required concentration). Halfway through the scene, someone entered w

...that they would never risk losing their license over something like dumb like subliminal messaging. They promise to fix the problem. My question is, do they really have to "intentionally" put up subliminal images to lose their license. I think the casinos should ditch their machines for sheer stupidity in doing something like this, lest the casinos themselves tarnish their "good" image. Not that I believe something like this is a sheer coincidence or "glitch".

"A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service

The summary is too afraid to actually reference the actual province, for fear that no one would recognize it??? It is actually the biggest one, Ontario, with 12,000,000+ people. Surely *some* of you 'Murkins must have heard of it.

On my map, there is a lake called Ontario then a dark mysterious region to the north of it with the cryptic warning "here be dragons".

I think subconsciously, we United Statsians mentally block out Canada's existence ( on many maps Alaska looks like its an island) to salve the pains of our failure to liberate the northern part of the continent from the British imperialists back in 1812.

I've been developing casino-type games for over 12 years, so I know how they work. This is not at all surprising since slot machines are entirely based on fraud and conning you into believing and 'feeling' like you have a chance of winning - this is just another step in that direction.

The most sinister devices employed by the slot machines are the most fraudulent. I am referring virtual reel mapping and the near miss system. Here's how they work:

Virtual reel mapping works like this: You think that a reel has 24 symbols (12 symbols, 12 blank spots) and conclude that your chances of obtaining any particular combination is 24^3. Not so. What happens is that the slot spins 3 virtual reels, each one consisting of 32 symbols. Positions on the virtual reel are mapped to positions on the physical reel, but guess what, the virtual reels have 8 extra symbols, and they're all mapped to blank spots on the physical reels! This significantly reduces your chances of obtaining a winning combination.

The near-miss system works like this: Considering the virtual reel mapping mechanism described above, the near miss principal works on the basis that the extra 8 blank spots on the virtual wheel are mapped to locations on the physical reel RIGHT NEXT TO the jackpot symbols. That's why you'll see "7 BLANK 7" and "7 7 BLANK" with frightening regularity.

And here's the kicker: There are jackpot symbols on the physical reels that aren't mapped to the virtual reel. Which means that there are symbols on the physical reels that will NEVER EVER show up on the pay line. If that isn't outright fraud, I don't know what is.

If one puts on their cynic hat to appreciate slots from a purely human-psychology point of view, one can truly appreciate how masterfully crafted the whole set-up is. It disgusting and magnificent at the same time.

I worked on spinning reel slots for WMS Gaming. To my knowledge all jurisdictions have laws regarding the relative frequency of physical reel positions (in Nevada it's 6:1 for adjacent positions and the labs got antsy if you went beyond 4:1) and as a consequence of these laws all physical reel positions must be hittable.

24 stop reels are very rare (never seen them in the real world in fact) because it makes the 12 symbols have to be pretty narrow. 22 stop is the standard although 18 stop was used from time to time. Virtual reels were commonly 72 stop. 32 stop doesn't extend the odds enough to be very useful and it also doesn't give you enough granularity between positions. You can go higher than 72 of course. I saw a math model for an IGT Five Times Pay that used a 90 stop virtual reel and one for a Triple Triple Diamond that used a 200 stop virtual reel. Those were 92% payout games if I remember rightly. I was told Quartermania used 255 stop virtual reels but I never personally saw math for it.

As a general point for people I'd like to say that there are indeed several techniques the machines use that are not commonly known, but all slot machine behaviour is VERY heavily regulated by law. If you want to know what they can and cannot do, look at the statutes. Ironically basically all the things people think the machines do are illegal and therefore not done.

Awesome - That is great clarification on the inner workings. I used 24 simply for illustrative purposes.

Interesting to note that I'm in Manitoba, Canada, and the "Responsible Gaming Center" in our Casinos will disclose that there are certain symbols on the physical reel that are not hittable. Time to look into our legislation on the subject...

That's interesting and what you describe is certainly fraud, but this article is about Konami. Every single Konami GBA title I have either crashes or has some kind of a lock up that I've found within only a few hours of play. Based on my experiences, I am certainly willing to believe that this was a bug, just as they said. Konami QA is lacking.

First off, the only place I've seen virtual reels used is in mechanical slot machines. Video slot machines' reel strips might be long but you still have the same odds to get any symbol on the reel.The reason that virtual reels were invented is because mechanical slot machines can only have a limited number of symbols on a reel due to physical limitations such as the size of the reel or the stepper motors that spin the reels. Let's say that number of symbols is 20. For a 3 reel machanical slot machine, that

When a player puts their money in a slot machine, they are forming a contract. The fraud occurs because the chance of winning is vastly different than a reasonable person would concluded based on their observation of the physical machine. The true odds are not disclosed to the player, and as the near-miss mechanism illustrates, active measures are taken to further trick the player into thinking they have a better chance of winning than they actually have.

I've never heard about that in any kind of class 3 slot machines (the normal kind of machines you'd find in Las Vegas). Is it possible that the slot machines in the casinos in Manitoba are class 2 machines? Class 2 machines aren't really slot machines in the normal sense. They're more like instant winner scratch cards that get their payout from a central determination system and then just use the reels to present the win to the player. It is possible on those machines that you'd never see a certain combinat

Sometimes he demonstrates card tricks, and yes, he admits that they are "only" tricks.But you honestly can't deny some of his other "tricks" or "magic" employing NLP, suggestion, misdirection and pyschology.

His strenght is that he very often actually reveals how he did it. And when you realize how he did it, you know that there is much more in it than just "magic" or whatever catch-it-all word you label it. I actually did some of the simpler stuff he did, and yes it is hard to pull off, yes you need suggest

It's just inside a 3-inch long horizontal slot on the front of the machine. You have to trigger it using the right sized piece of paper. Like most secret codes, it'll take you quite a few tries to get it right...